


This Will Be the End of Me

by Bracefacefreak



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Amnesia, Angst, Dean finally gets his apple pie life, F/M, Fallen Castiel, Gen, M/M, The Big Finale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-14
Updated: 2013-07-14
Packaged: 2017-12-20 05:11:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/883326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bracefacefreak/pseuds/Bracefacefreak
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean finally gets the apple pie life he's dreamed of, and for Castiel there's only one way this can end.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Will Be the End of Me

**Author's Note:**

> This was based on a headcanon I posted the other day on my tumblr account. Someone asked for something a little more extensive and as I haven't written anything in a long time I thought I might as well give it a go. 
> 
> This is unbeta-ed, but I hope you enjoy. (First Dean/Cas fic eek!)

Beautiful.

 Cas can think of no other word to describe him in this moment; it presents itself in every tongue he knows and is true in all of them.

Dean’s face is alight with a joy the angel has never witnessed before, it erases the heavy lines that had been etched into his sun-worn skin over the past decades.   
And behind the weak confines of flesh and bone, his soul is luminous.

Blinding.

Cas squints against the brightness, barely able to look at the fountain of light and warmth which seems intent in drawing him closer. As if it recognises his presence.

The priest speaks and Cas focuses on his steady monotone, the well recited words, _anything_ to resist the pull.

“If anyone here knows of any lawful impediment to this marriage, they should declare it now.”

The chapel is quiet.  
The silence presses down on him and for a second he can’t feel his wings or the melodic hum of his Grace.

Across from him Dean bristles beneath the smooth lines of his suit.

Cas bites his lips, holds himself taut and as the priest continues something inside him slips.

He wobbles, shakes himself and as Dean leans forward to slip a ring onto his bride’s finger, soul pulsing with white hot joy, Cas whispers to his brethren.

“Dean Winchester is wed.”

There is a buzz in his ears, his brothers and sisters responding with congratulations.

But Cas is alone.

 

….

 

Cas cannot be deterred from his guardianship.

The other angels leave him to it.

They whisper behind his back, call him names unbefitting of the new Heaven he has crafted. But he can scarcely blame them. He is more human now, than angel. His Grace feels too big; he can feel it splintering as he forces himself back into the shackles of Jimmy Novak’s body.

He vaguely wonders how long before it is gone altogether.

Still he will not be convinced otherwise. He would not give up his watching for anyone in the world…save one.   
And they are no longer his to claim.   
They never had been.

Years pass, like leaves blown about by an October wind, little more than the length of a sigh in Cas’s existence and yet it feels like eternity.

Dean’s family grows: a daughter and then another are added to the couple’s comfortable life.  
Cas watches their first steps from the shadowy corner of the living room, hears their first words mumbled to the ecstatic parents. Unseen but always there, just as he promised.

But there are no burning nurseries, no demon blood and the only monsters Dean Winchester must fight are the ones in his toddler’s dreams.

Cas smiles, sends the same message to the Host every day.

“Dean Winchester is happy.”

 He knows no-one is listening

 

....

 

He watches for five years.

Watches the Righteous Man live the apple pie life he deserves; unaware of the fact that he saved the world a hundred times over, unaware that he and his brother were bought up in a living nightmare, unaware that he is still the gravity that holds Cas together, unaware that Cas even exists.

The pain grows over time until eventually it feels like his ribs are cracking every-time he takes a breath.   
  
His Grace continues to splurge out of his vessel, dripping at the seams and sometimes he swears he is leaving huge puddles of mercurial-light as he flits through the Winchester’s life.

And finally, on the eve of Dean’s fortieth birthday, he cracks.

He should have known right from the start; right from the day when he had ignored his orders and taken hold of that impossibly-bright soul in the deepest recesses of the pit.

So, as he stands in a white hallway and forces his hand into the heart of his being, all he can do is laugh. Because he should have seen this coming. It was the only ending left from him.  

 At first he burns. So hot and so furiously he thinks he might explode.

The cold that follows is worse.  It burrows itself into his bones, right down until it is sat in his marrow and he knows he will never shake it out.

The chill of humanity.

He falls just as the clock strikes midnight on January 24th.

 

….

 

James Harvelle is a normal man. One hundred-percent perfectly normal. He has a wife, a mortgage and a baby on the way.

No-one knows that the first forty-two years of his life are a blur; that his name, passport and birth certificate are a product of his own imagination and a very talented con-artist in Pontiac, Illinois.  
It was hard at first but over time he’s become an expert at lying. Sometimes he hates himself for it.

He works in the physics department at the University a few towns over. The travel is a nightmare but the pay is good and he likes numbers and equations and forces. He finds an odd sort of comfort in them.  
Then once a week he spends the night in the garden with the telescope he got for his ‘birthday’ looking out at the vastness of space. Some nights he thinks he could name every star through his lens. A couple of times he tried, just to humour himself, and was rewarded with only a blinding headache and white-hot unconsciousness.

And then there is the weekly shop and the man three check-outs over with the gravelly chuckle and lively green eyes.    
  
James doesn’t know his name, doesn’t know anything about the guy, but every week at around  eleven-thirty there he is, buying strawberry pop-tarts and laughing at the check-out girls awkward jokes. James smiles but for a split second each week it feels like his heart is about to burst. The first time it happened he thought he was having a heart attack.

But sure as night follows day the feeling passes and James walks past, gives the man a brief smile, a vague nod and life continues in all its glorious normality.  

 


End file.
